Downtown
is it busy busy, outside the card-rooms?
In these days of the strip providing all the glitz and glamour and a lot of the top facilities and expansion of the city elsewhere, are the Downtown hotels still busy?
How big is downtown?
(never been there, hence the questions)
Busy? It HEAVES!
I don't know about the Hotels, never stayed Downtown (yet), Marky & Co would know best, but they seem to be full.
But Fremont Street is just amazing, unbelievably so.
As you may know, I don't do crowds & that sort of stuff, if I go up to Leicester Square or whatever, I feel physically uncomfortable, I loathe being in crowds, hustle & bustle, all meandering in different directions, it does my head in, but Fremont Street, especially this year, is the greatest thing ever.
You probably know the "Fremont Street Experience" is actually a Coropration, charged with providing Entertinment & a good Tourist experience. Never have I been more impressed with what they are doing there.
I have, literally, hundreds of random photos from Fremont Street at night, it is THE most exciting thing ever.
During Tourney breaks & I go outside & have a wander, and after I bust, I generally spend an hour or more just gawping at all the sights & sounds.
The evening warmth is bearable, but all the (tourist) ladies wear shorts or summer frocks, & look so pretty.
Along the centre of Fremont Street are little "tat stands", jewellery, Oxygen Bars (!), "engrave your name on a grain of rice", moody jewellery, all that sort of stuff.
There are two "fixed" music stages, one at the far end, one in the centre, by the corner of Binions & Nugget. Each stage has a band or turn every night.
Then there are street entertainers. DOZENS of them. Puppetteers, a lady who crafts bamboo stuff into pretty stuff, a drummer guy who has three upturned empty water bottles (5 gallon jobbies) for drums, a bloke who eats his guitar, a jazz bloke, portrait painters, all sorts.
Then, wandering around are all these lookalikes. A NFL player, "17, Jackson", Rocky (boxer bloke from a film), Cupid, the Star Wars characters, Disney characters, Marilyn Monroe, cowboys, the Chippendales, scores of them, everywhere.
They have two young ladies with monster boobs, which are supported on a sort of cantilever device, must be mega strong, & they just have a little star on each of their nipply wipplys.
They also have a "zipwire" thing that goes half the length of Fremont Street. you get strapped in a harness, dangling from a wire, & get catpulted 200 yards in mid-air in this contraption. **** that.
Then there is the "Light Show", where live & moving images of one of the bands, or turns, is somehow beamed onto the Fremont Sreet glass roof.
The whole place is astonishing.
There are, of course, a few low lifes & hobos hanging around, "give me a cigarette", but no big deal really, & there are loads of police on patrol. I could upload scores of photos, but you'd all yawn.
Next doors cameraman is arriving midweek, & I start work then, but I'm taking him to Fremont Street to try & capture the magic.